Until Disasters Pass
by Sonnenkoenigen
Summary: Yullen Week, theme: Shelter. Post-crappy mission decompression; call it a missing chapter to The Book of Vices and Virtues. The boys play fair.


**Author's note: **Consider this a missing chapter from The Book of Vices and Virtues, fitting in somewhere between Clean Heart and The Child of Hatred and Grief.

Don't own anything having to do with DGM. What else in here I don't own is in my end note.

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**Until Disasters Pass**

"Kanda!"

It took less than a second to take in the scene in front of him: the Finder on the ground, one hand on his abdomen and the other on Allen's arm, Allen protecting the wound but not putting pressure on it, his eyes frightened. Somehow, the idiot of a Finder had caught a piece of shrapnel, and either they got it out or risked internal damage trying to move him. Or he might bleed to death, depending on how big it was and where it was lodged.

The Finders were trained as medics, but the other Finder's coat was crumpled at the foot of the stone wall, empty. He must have been shot when the barrier failed.

"Son of a bitch!" Kanda said to himself. He hated dealing with the wounded. He hated trying to save people.

He didn't have a choice. Allen was going to try whether Kanda helped or not, and it would go faster and more smoothly if Kanda helped, so he ran over.

Beside Allen was a brown bottle, laudanum, and although the Finder was still conscious, he was quiet, drifting in the poppy fog. His shirt had been pulled aside, exposing the deep gash in his abdomen. A surgical kit lay open on the grass, steel tools gleaming gold in the evening sun, and other things stood ready, too, gauze, tape, a second, much larger bottle. Allen's eyes, when he looked at Kanda, were apprehensive.

"Kanda, he doesn't have chloroform. You're going to have to hold him down. I'm going to sit on your legs," Allen said to the Finder whose eyes were glazed with pain and opium. "Kanda, give him something to bite on and hold his arms."

This was the part Kanda dreaded. It wasn't blood that bothered him, it was the desperate struggle to survive, and he took a long breath, pushing it away from himself as he exhaled and removed his glove. "Maybe we'll get lucky and he'll pass out."

"One can only hope," Allen muttered, picking up a pair of tweezers. "Ready?"

Kanda put his glove between the Finder's teeth and grabbed the man's shoulders, holding them still against the ground.

The Finder bit down on the glove, grabbed Kanda's arms and closed his eyes.

Allen's tweezers dug into the wound.

The Finder's cry of pain was muffled by Kanda's glove, and Kanda put his full weight onto the Finder's shoulders as the man fought with all his might to stay still. Allen's face went white, but he didn't stop, gazing blankly off to the side as he focused everything on what he could feel. Tears streamed down into the Finder's hair, but laudanum couldn't erase the agony of amateur surgery.

What little patience Kanda had snapped. "Do you want to live or not?"

The Finder nodded, wide-eyed with a fear Kanda would never understand.

"Then hold it together!"

"Shut the hell up, Kanda," Allen said through gritted teeth, then he gave a small nod, and Kanda saw an two-inch-long chunk of bloody metal slowly emerge from the wound.

"Hurry up." Kanda glanced at the reddening horizon. "We're losing light."

"I said, shut up!" Allen grabbed for the gauze, then spilled some of the contents of the bigger bottle over the wound, daubing at the excess as he worked.

Kanda felt the tremendous effort it took for the Finder to keep from fighting them as Allen cleaned and stitched the wound. Carbolic, Kanda had heard, burned like hellfire, and each time the needle dug in, Kanda's glove muffled another groan.

When it was over, Allen sat back, his hands covered with blood, and smiled his clown smile. "You're going to be all right," he said to the Finder.

Kanda let up on Finder's shoulders, and his body seemed to collapse in on itself, no longer engaged in a war against a tiny, lethal bit of metal as well as the efforts to remove it. If he made it through the night, they would go back short one man, not two. For what that was worth.

Allen began the the gentle, patient process of binding the wound, and Kanda went back to the ruin, kicking old masonry out of the way, digging through the rubble until he found the ancient tablet. He picked it up and turned it over in his hand. They had lost a man for this, but it was considered far more valuable than people, especially people who couldn't fight. He smashed the tablet and tucked the Innocence away, then retrieved the other Finder's clothes and pack, all that was left after the Akuma virus had finished with him.

"Well?" Kanda asked as he got back to where Allen was putting the bandages and medical tools back into the Finder's backpack.

"He needs a doctor."

"We'll go in the morning. It's too dark now."

"He could die!" Allen said, his voice nearly cracking in his distress.

"If we try to make it back to the mainland right now, we'll all die. I'm not doing it." That settled the matter, because there was no way Allen could handle the boat alone.

"Fuck you, Kanda," Allen spat, then he invoked his arm and tore two, straight saplings out of the ground, his claw scraping off roots and branches with more fury than was absolutely necessary.

Kanda said nothing, just removed the blanket from the Finder's pack and helped Allen lash it to the saplings. The only words they exchanged were a count of three when the transferred the injured man from the ground to their makeshift stretcher.

They walked in silence, partly to make sure their burden stayed steady and partly because any attempt at conversation would turn into a fight, and not just one of their usual squabbles. They were on opposite ground here, each giving way only because the other had exercised a veto. Although they carried the Finder carefully, Kanda was meditating on what a shame it was that he had to do his cutting practice on rolled bamboo mats rather than certain other Exorcists. What Allen was thinking, he didn't ask, but the energy he felt behind him resembled a volcano on the verge of eruption.

When they got to the house, they took the Finder to the ground-floor bedroom. It had taken him long enough, but he had finally passed out, and they were able to move him to his bed without waking him. Allen started fussing again, checking bandages, going out to the well for water. Kanda went up to the washroom to rid himself of the dust and blood of the mission.

When Kanda looked in, he wasn't the slightest bit surprised to see Allen sitting by the Finder's bed, his head in his hands. He hadn't even bothered to take off his coat. Seeing Allen like this triggered a visceral panic in Kanda, which in the space of half a breath became rage. He could not stand anything that seemed like a display of weakness, but in his mind, weakness was one step before death. He had trampled it down in himself, and was determined to destroy it in those he was forced to depend on. Allen, who refused to even try to conceal it, was a source of unending aggravation.

"Go to bed," Kanda said, jerking his thumb over his shoulder.

"Someone should watch him."

"What for?" Kanda asked, wishing he could hit the beansprout without starting a fight. Unfortunately, Allen didn't back down that easily, especially not from Kanda.

"He might get sepsis," Allen said.

"He can do that without your supervision," Kanda said.

"Piss off, Kanda," Allen said, but there was no heat in it. He hated seeing anyone in pain, hated even more when he was the one to inflict it.

"He'll survive until tomorrow."

"Someone should stay with him, just in case."

Kanda rolled his eyes. Moments like this were why he despised this idiot. "Is there anything you can do to prevent it?"

"No, but…"

"Or stop it once it starts?"

"No, but…"

"Is he going to benefit in any way from you sitting here moping?"

"Shut up, you heartless bastard." But this, too, was said without any energy, as if Allen had pulled it all tight around him and was shivering in its inadequate warmth.

Kanda snarled internally. He could just leave Allen as he was. A night without sleep wouldn't kill him, and Kanda knew that the beansprout could work his way through this alone. Allen had seen plenty of death, he had just chosen, for reasons of his own, not to inure himself to it, insisting on grieving for everybody he couldn't save.

Kanda, though, was restless and angry. He, too, didn't like like death. It inspired envy that ripped deep into him like the teeth and claws of lions. "Leave him alone, and come to bed."

Allen turned at the change in verb, giving Kanda a speculative look. "That's the first genuinely good idea you've had all night."

"Shut up before I change my mind."

"Your loss, and you know it!" But it was said with a glimmer of a smile as Allen got up and faced Kanda squarely. The sense of challenge was still in the air, but it had shifted onto safer ground.

Kanda looked Allen up and down, taking in the dirt and sweat and blood. "Wash first. You're disgusting."

Allen glanced down at himself and blinked, as if he was seeing his gory coat for the first time. "All right." And he walked past Kanda toward the open door, their shoulders almost but not quite brushing.

Kanda glared at the Finder, before going to the kitchen for oil, then he sat in his room, meditating until he heard the sound of bare feet on hardwood. He unfolded his legs and stood up, knowing that Allen was too courteous to interrupt even if invited. Allen didn't knock, but if there was an invitation, there was no need for it, and it might give them away. Instead, he came in quietly, shirtless, still drying his hair.

Allen tossed the towel over the back of a wooden chair and walked into Kanda's arms, smelling of soap, his fingers going straight to Kanda's shirt buttons as Kanda's hands settled on his hips. There were no words, no sound in the room but the rustle of fabric and the hushed click of a wet kiss.

The rush of their breathing began to take over as they ran out of clothes and their mouths found other things to do, touching down on newly-exposed skin, tasting, biting, promising and begging for more. Allen pushed, but Kanda pulled, walking backward until he reached the bed, then stretching himself out on the blanket as Allen's body settled over him like wings.

Every death reopened Allen's wounds, reminding him of the first lost soul he had ever seen, and all that he'd seen since. Kanda felt it, too, but in a different way. Casualties set him apart, as everyone was forced to remember that he couldn't die, and each time it happened, it left him feeling raw and exposed.

This fixed it. Allen's passionate revelry in the touch of Kanda's skin, the spark and crackle that had taken over his aura, the hum of his parasitic Innocence, were the same as they would be with any other. Some might have resented that in a desire to be unique to their lover, but Kanda was glad. In this place, in this way, he was no different from the others. Even his own responses were the same, the tension in his groin, the heightened sensitivity of his skin, the hunger that only increased as it was fed.

So when Allen leaned up and nudged his shoulder, Kanda rolled to his stomach, pressing himself into the mattress with a contented sigh as Allen started at his neck, kissing his way down. In this way, only in this way, Kanda's simple existence was enough, his lab–born body an instrument strung for Allen's mouth and hands, which sought out those places that Kanda most liked to be touched, a tongue tracing a vertebra at the base of his spine while a claw drew a line up the inside of his thigh. Kanda shifted, bending one knee, exposing even more sensitive skin to the hand that reshaped itself before accepting the invitation, going from sharp, teasing points to a gentle, exploring caress. When Allen reached for the oil, Kanda arched his back, welcoming slick fingers, blunt pressure, that uncertain instant just before Allen breached, then their twin, whispered groans as he slid home, a rare moment of perfect accord.

In this thing that the dead did not have, that the Akuma could not do, this thing left to the survivors, in this deep heat, warm breath, new sweat on clean skin, there was a respite from the spears and arrows that surrounded them. As long as they were like this, nothing else mattered, not the war, not the weapons forged to fight it, not the dead it left in its wake.

Allen shoved in deep and buried his face in Kanda's neck, his claw digging into the blanket, gasping with moans he didn't dare give voice to, and Kanda nearly smiled to himself. He liked it that there were things in Allen Walker that only he could bring out, that genuine anger and this, too, that was real, a small victory in his ongoing battle against the hated clown.

Allen collapsed onto Kanda's back, and Kanda let him rest there, all too familiar with that paralyzing euphoria. It was what he had offered and asked for, and in a little while, it would be his as well.

Once he recovered, Allen withdrew and rolled Kanda to his back, a wicked gleam in his eyes. Anticipation shot through Kanda, heightened as Allen settled himself half on the bed and half on Kanda's abdomen, then came the much-needed mercy of Allen's wet mouth and agile tongue.

Allen played for a while, even using his laughter at Kanda's growing impatience as torment until Kanda was starting to think he'd mistaken that look, but then he felt Allen empty his lungs, saw the shift in the angle of Allen's head, and drew in a breath of his own as Allen took him in so deep that his nose touched Kanda's skin.

Kanda couldn't do it. He'd tried once and nearly threw up, but Allen could swallow anything. It was slow, though, made all the more maddening by the fact that Kanda had to fight his urge to thrust into the tightness of Allen's throat. Allen needed complete control, and the longer it went on, the more difficult that was to give up.

The worst was those last few minutes, when Kanda's body screamed for relief that came toward him at the pace of the sun creeping up toward the horizon, light and color intensifying until they became too much to bear. He dug his fingers into Allen's thigh, a silent plea for completion, and Allen took a deep breath letting it out through his nose as he took Kanda in to the hilt. A pit opened suddenly beneath him, only instead of falling into it himself, all of Kanda's rage and fear tumbled down instead, every nerve in his body singing joyously enough to wake the dawn.

Allen withdrew, placed a kiss just below Kanda's navel, then sat up, running a soothing hand up Kanda's thigh. "Thank you."

Kanda nodded once, the closest he would get to a return thanks.

Allen rose, wiped himself off with the towel, and put his trousers on. The attentions he'd paid to Kanda had had some effect on him and he could probably be ready for more in fifteen, maybe twenty minutes. So could Kanda. Privacy of this kind was rare and they usually took full advantage of it, but the only thing to do between rounds was talk, and they were in no mood for conversation. This wasn't a matter of pride. It was a conflict of principle. Still, Kanda thought he might sleep, that Allen might, too, and they could deal with whatever the morning brought them with no more than their usual hostility.

Allen looked at Kanda, and although there was still grief in his eyes, they were filled even more with compassion and reproach: _I just don't want you to hurt so much, that's all._

_You're in no position to say a damned thing about pain, you masochistic bastard,_ Kanda thought. He couldn't budge Allen for the same reason Allen couldn't budge him. Neither of them could stand the other's pain, but neither of them had a solution. They both hurt, they just went about it differently.

Still, the part of their souls left bared by death had been tucked under warm feathers, sheltered against the monsters that paced in the dark, and Allen smiled one of the few smiles Kanda could tolerate before he closed the door carefully behind him.

Kanda cleaned up and got into bed, perversely pleased that it was Allen who had to leave the room this time. He stayed awake long enough to listen for the sounds of doors and footsteps, to make sure the beansprout didn't have a relapse, then he drifted off to sleep.

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_...and in your wings' shadow do I shelter, until disasters pass..._

_ - Psalm 57:2, translation by Robert Alter_


End file.
